The exiled, p.1
The Exiled, page 1
About the Author
Sarah Daniels is a former archaeologist who escaped academia and now writes stories from her home in rural Lincolnshire. Her work has been published in various online magazines and has been nominated for Best British and Irish Flash Fiction and Best Small Fictions. The Exiled is her second novel, and part of an unputdownable duology.
Contents
PART ONE: EXILE 1: ESTHER
2: MEG
3: ESTHER
4: MEG
5: ESTHER
6: MEG
7: ESTHER
8: ESTHER
9: MEG
10: ESTHER
11: MEG
12: ESTHER
13: ESTHER
14: ESTHER
15: MEG
16: ESTHER
17: MEG
18: ESTHER
19: ESTHER
20: MEG
21: ESTHER
THREE DAYS EARLIER
22: NIK
23: JANEK
24: NIK
25: JANEK
26: NIK
27: JANEK
28: NIK
29: NIK
30: NIK
31: JANEK
32: NIK
33: JANEK
34: NIK
35: JANEK
36: NIK
37: JANEK
38: NIK
39: NIK
40: ESTHER
41: ESTHER
42: NIK
43: MEG
44: NIK
45: MEG
46: ESTHER
47: MEG
48: NIK
49: ESTHER
PART TWO: ESCAPE 50: NIK
51: ESTHER
52: JANEK
53: ESTHER
54: NIK
55: MEG
56: NIK
57: NIK
58: ESTHER
59: NIK
60: ESTHER
61: MEG
62: NIK
63: NIK
64: ESTHER
65: JANEK
66: ESTHER
67: NIK
68: MEG
69: ESTHER
70: JANEK
71: ESTHER
72: MEG
73: JANEK
74: NIK
75: JANEK
76: ESTHER
77: ESTHER
78: NIK
79: JANEK
80: ESTHER
81: NIK
82: ESTHER
83: NIK
84: JANEK
85: ESTHER
86: HARVEEN
87: NIK
88: ESTHER
89: NIK
90: ESTHER
91: NIK
EPILOGUE: ESTHER
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For every working-class kid – turns out we are allowed to be authors.
Part One
* * *
EXILE
Midnight. Sunday 13 March 2095
The temperature is currently -2°C. I expect it to drop further before the sun rises again. Current rations provide 1,500 calories per person per day.
We are the survivors of the cruise ship Arcadia. I believe we number more than a thousand. We’ve made it through a sub-zero winter with almost no fuel and the most basic shelters.
If you’re hearing this, please let me know that you’re still coming.
The Coalies could attack at any moment.
We need you.
Days in the camp: 120
1
Esther
My face stares back from the opposite wall of the alley. Even at midnight, I can make out the white glare of my skin, the eyes scratched out. Above my picture, in block capitals, the text reads MOST WANTED.
When the first posters appeared in the camp, people were convinced that Janek hid surveillance cameras in the eyes. No matter how many times the Coalies replace them, they only survive a few hours. Before long, someone brings a crowbar or a shard of glass and slices through the eyes until all that’s left is tattered paper and brick dust. The vandalism’s a blessing in a way. It means I don’t have to look myself in the face.
I blow into my hands. Come on, Pat. I’m freezing my butt off down here.
This alley leads away from the quayside shipyards, through the maze of warehouses and backstreets, and all the way to the other side of the camp. The red-brick buildings scrape the sky, but at ground level they’re filled with abandoned dumpsters and rats. As soon as we’d caught our breath after the Landfall mission went so disastrously wrong, we started mapping out the territory. It took us weeks to feel out the edges of the place. To understand what we’d been left with.
Pat’s footsteps clomp down the nearest alley, getting nearer, and the next second he comes into view. He’s wearing all black and carrying a holdall across his back.
‘All clear?’ I say.
‘Let’s go a different way.’ He walks past me without slowing, glancing at the poster I’ve been staring at for the past five minutes.
I don’t move. ‘Why do we need to find another way?’
‘I scouted the alley for booby traps, but there’s a corner at the top of one of the buildings I couldn’t get a clear view of. I don’t want to risk walking through it in case there’s a trap hidden up where I can’t see.’ Pat carries on down the alley, away from the section of fence we need to get to. When he realizes I’m not following, he stops.
I fold my arms. ‘Don’t lie to me, Huang.’
‘Like I’d dare.’
‘You didn’t mention not being able to see when you checked for booby traps last night. Or the night before that.’
The air crackles with frost, and Pat’s breath streams out in a cloud. ‘I’m telling you: I can’t see well enough now. Let’s go.’
I stare Pat right in his distractingly attractive face and look for signs of lying. Because he is lying. This is the path we’ve taken every night this week. The routine always the same: him going ahead to look for booby traps. Me hanging back in the shadows, wearing a patched augmented-reality mask to disguise myself.
I spin on my heel and make for the alleyway he’s trying so desperately to keep me out of.
He grabs me by the arm, not hard enough to hurt. ‘Esther.’ His face pleads with me, and for a millisecond I think about obeying.
Damn you and your cute face, Patrick Huang.
‘We’ve got a job to do. If we don’t make it to the fence in time, we’ll miss our window. That’s the quickest route. Tell me what’s up there.’
He relents. I stride along the backstreet. The shadows bleed away as we walk, and there’s the familiar tumble of rats running in the darkness. At first, all I see is the same industrial architecture as always: brick-lined ground, metal fire escapes, blank doors. Everything brutal and lifeless. My breath catches when I see why Pat tried to put me off. There’s a new wanted poster. It shows Nik as he was when we first met. Hair slightly too long. Cocky grin on his face. Our eyes are untouched. This time, someone has daubed a word over us in red paint, so thick it runs in lines over our faces: TRAITORS.
I bite the end of my tongue between my teeth and try not to let Pat see the flash of pain.
‘They don’t mean it …’ Pat whispers.
‘There are more?’
‘All the way along this stretch of warehouses.’
‘Let’s find a different way,’ I say.
Pat’s new route takes us down to the edge of the water. My heart rate triples when I catch my first glimpse of the Arcadia. It lies exactly where it fell four months ago. Half out of the water, straddling the ocean and the dock like a leviathan. Its anchor chain – the individual links as long as my leg – hangs from a hole in the front of the hull. Each rope dangling from the rail is a reminder of someone who went into the water that day. The smell of rotting seaweed and seawater taints the air. As always, I keep my eyes away from the blackened area at the back of the ship. That’s where the fire spread from the captain’s office, eating up deck after deck.
The ship obliterated this section of dock when it ploughed into it. The prow sliced through the concrete, churning it up in great slabs. The rubble extends in all directions. As we pass in front of the debris, I can’t block out the sounds the ship makes. The structure creaks with the movement of the water, wails echo round its metal hulk like death cries.
Pat checks me with a glance, but doesn’t say anything. He knows being this close to the Arcadia triggers memories. A flash of red, a body drops to the ground.
When we finally turn a corner and the Arcadia slips out of view, the tension in my body lessens. We trudge uphill along an alley until we’re as far from the ship and the ocean as we can go.
After I crashed the ship, people ran for their lives, but the Coalies fenced off a stretch of the coast with terrifying speed. Hundreds of us were trapped inside a finger of land less than five square miles. They didn’t even seem to care what was inside the fence, as long as we couldn’t escape. So we ended up with a handful of derelict industrial buildings and empty factories and a long slice of beach and sand dunes that are now covered in tents and hastily thrown-up shelters. Silas Cuinn claimed the far end of the camp. I’ve had no reason to enter his territory and have no intention of changing that. Silas saved me from Hadley last year, but I’m not stupid enough to think that makes us friends.
The fence surrounding the camp billows in the breeze like a sail. It’s made from some sort of silky mesh that’s so thin I can only see the shape of the road and the abandoned buildings on the
Pat swings the holdall off his back and unzips it. I turn off the AR mask to ease the tension headache it brings and hug myself to keep warm while Pat gets our gear ready. It feels below freezing tonight, a fact that makes my chest tight with grief. Tomorrow, we’ll check the tents and cardboard hovels of the camp to see who didn’t make it. We’ll carry their bodies to the sandy place we’ve set aside as a graveyard.
My stomach rumbles, and my mind is dragged to the mealy chocolate-style protein bar nestled in the pocket of my uniform. Not yet. Wait a couple more hours.
‘Ready?’ I say, looking up at the fence. I’ve tried climbing it. And I’ve tried going underneath. And I’ve tried cutting through, which was the worst option because damaging it brings the Coalies, and then you have to run for your life.
Pat’s standing a few metres along the fence, his back to me. ‘We’ve only got five minutes until the next Coaly patrol comes this way,’ he says, walking back to me. ‘Let’s give it a miss.’
‘No. The reinforcements might arrive any day. We’ve got to be ready if General Lall tells us it’s time to fight.’
Pat bends down to fasten a set of pads over the tops of my boots. ‘Last time you said you could still feel the shock from the fence, so I’ve made the material thicker. It should do nothing but tingle now. And I tightened the strap around the wrist too.’
‘Good. Can we get on with it?’ I say.
I need something, just a tiny win against the people keeping us here. More importantly, I need to know that there are ways through this barrier when the time comes.
‘You’ll be complaining if you get shocked again.’ He tightens the Velcro on my kneepads.
‘Keep an eye out for bots while I’m climbing. And I think we might have a visitor,’ I say, nodding towards the end of the buildings where a small shadow watches us.
I walk as far from the fence as I can get, tensing and releasing my hands.
‘Attempt ninety-three,’ Pat says. ‘Remember: make contact and pull downwards so that the micro-hooks go through the mesh.’
‘Got it.’
My back’s pressed against the brick wall of an abandoned warehouse, so cold I can feel it leaching through my uniform. Pat arranges a wooden box halfway between me and the fence. I take a breath and hold on to the moment of stillness. I run. Pushing myself off from the crate, I hit the fence and lose all hope. It billows away from me like I’m trying to climb a bedsheet. Then my knee catches it, and I manage to grab a section with my hands, and I clamp my knees, my ankles on to it. I’m suspended halfway up, swinging.
‘Yeah!’ A high-pitched voice comes from the alleyway. ‘We did it!’
‘Go to bed, Dylan,’ I call, making no attempt to mask my irritation.
‘I can help. Look, I got all of these,’ he yells. His footsteps echo closer in the darkness.
I twist round so that I can see him, and get a swirl of vertigo. I’m only a few metres up, but I still don’t fancy the fall. Dylan wafts a bag back and forth, and I know without asking what’s in it. Wanted posters printed in black, white and felony red.
‘Try bringing your knee slightly up before you move away from the fence,’ Pat says. I can tell he’s standing with his arms crossed, like he does, and that Dylan will be copying him movement for movement.
I do as Pat says and feel the pad on my knee reattach. Dylan lets out another whoop of triumph. ‘She’s doing it!’
Excitement forces me upwards. By the time I reach the top, I’m panting and sweaty, but this is the highest we’ve managed to get and, as far as I can tell, we’ve not tripped the security system.
Without the haze of the fence to obscure my view, I can see further and clearer than at ground level. There’s a short stretch of broken tarmac, a few knotty, leafless shrubs, then the train track and a line of saplings. Everything’s bleached colourless by the thin street lights, dusty with frost. There’s an abandoned trailer, tyres flattened against the ground. This territory that the Federated States has temporarily gifted us is a wasteland right on the edge of its capital city. It’d be poetic that this is where they’ve decided to keep us if it wasn’t so soul-destroying. In the distance, a bus trundles along the road towards us, turning before it’s close enough to make out any details. I can just see the distant twinkling lights of the first high-rise buildings of downtown. We’re so close to the life of the city, I can almost touch it. I wish I could go further. Haul myself over the top and run and run.
‘Next patrol will be here in two minutes,’ Pat says.
‘Just another second.’
I take a breath and try to drink in the details. I might not get this far out of the camp again for a while.
‘You got any food?’ I hear Dylan say somewhere beneath me. The kid’s hungry 24-7, which isn’t surprising. Eleven-year-olds should be eating three full meals a day. He’s lucky if he gets anything at all.
‘Will you go home to bed if I feed you?’ Pat asks.
‘Cross my heart,’ Dylan says.
‘I’ve got a protein bar,’ I say. I take one arm off the fence and rummage in my pocket with my free hand, pulling out the foil-wrapped rectangle. I toss it. Dylan makes a clean catch, tears into the wrapper and shoves the whole thing in his mouth at once.
‘Better?’ I ask.
He nods. ‘Better.’
‘Now get lost,’ Pat says to him without unfolding his arms.
‘Hey, Dylan,’ I shout after him.
‘Yeah?’
‘Thanks for tearing down all those posters.’
Dylan grins and makes finger guns at us as he jogs backwards, before turning and sprinting into the darkness.
‘What’s the betting he doesn’t go straight home?’ Pat says, half to himself.
Above my head, something catches my eye. Silvery, thin as money spiders’ silk. ‘There’s something else up here,’ I say.
‘Describe it.’
‘Looks like a wire. Goes all the way along the top of the fence.’ Something that thin can’t be dangerous. I stretch up to it.
‘Esther, don’t touch –’
Before my finger even makes contact, a charge shoots through my hand, through my arm, through my head. A burst of static blinds me. Then I’m on the ground, eardrums trilling so loud my whole body vibrates.
I open my eyes to a cloud of stars. Pat’s face is in front of me. His eyes are all tight with worry, and his mouth moves like he’s talking, but I can’t hear anything. He looks along the fence, and his face crumples in fear. Then he’s pulling on my arm.
I force myself up. The smell of burning follows me, and there’s pain, dull and all-encompassing. ‘What happened?’ I croak. My brain feels like breath on a mirror.
‘What happened is you can’t leave things well enough alone.’ His voice is stern as he pulls me into the nearest alley.
I’m struggling under my own weight. My legs bend beneath me. Pat manoeuvres us into a doorway so that we’re barely sheltered by a fire-escape staircase.
I put my head back against the wall. ‘What’s that smell?’
‘That’s the smell you make when you’re set on fire.’
‘I touched the wire,’ I say. ‘It hurt like hell.’
‘That’s what two thousand volts will do for you. And I think you triggered the alarm system. They’ll be here any second. If we can get a couple of alleys away, we’ll lose them. Reckon you can walk?’
I push my back into the wall and lift upwards. My legs wobble. There’s a strobe of light near the fence. Dread trickles down my spine. ‘Go,’ I whisper.
Pat puts his finger to his lips. He shakes his head and reaches his hand behind my ear, bringing us eye to eye so that I can smell the earthy jasmine tea his mum brews on his breath. His fingers move around in my hair until he finds the flat button that activates my AR mask, and I feel the tightening ache of it round my temples, see the blue haze wash over my eyes. Now my face is disguised by the holographic image of someone else’s. It’s not high-tech – this model is so old it sometimes glitches off, revealing my true face, and it doesn’t cope well with facial expressions. It won’t help if the Coalies get near enough to look closely.
